Golf Solitaire Rules

Gameplay

The Stock: The facedown pile on the bottom left. It is used to draw cards from and put on the Waste.

The Waste: The faceup pile next to the Stock. It's empty in the beginning.

The objective is to move all cards from the columns onto the waste. You can only move the topmost card in each column at a time. You can move a card onto the Waste if it ranks one higher, or one lower than the topmost card on the waste. E.g. if there's a 6 on the Waste you can move a 5 or a 7 there. Initially the Waste is empty and you can move any card there.

If you have no cards in the columns that can be moved to the Waste then you can get a card from the Stock and turn it over to the Waste. Be aware though that you can only go one time through the Stock, there are no resets allowed.

Winning

A game is considered won if all the cards from the columns have been moved to the Waste. The number of cards in the Stock at the end does not matter.

If you have no possible moves left, and the Stock is finished then the game is lost, but you can always use the Undo button to try out different strategies.

Scoring

The objective is to get rid of all the cards, so the number one thing that counts is number of cards left. If you have 0 cards left you have won. The game also counts the moves you use to get your result, so if two players complete the same game, the player that does it in the fewest moves is considered to have the best result in that game.

Variations

There are many variations of Golf Solitaire possible. I have made this version fairly relaxed. In particular, you are allowed to:

"Turn the Corner", that is put an Ace onto a King, or a King onto an Ace, even though an Ace is considered low.

Put down a Queen onto a King. In the strictest version of Golf Solitaire you are not allowed to put any cards onto a King, but I allow both Queens and Aces.

According to Wikipedia this should result in about 93% of all games being winnable.